Switch

by Clarice Clique

Genres: Erotic & Steamy Romance

Synopsis

An erotic contemporary novel with mixed themes including m/f, fem dom, fem sub, BDSM and interracial. April desires only one man, the man she?s always loved, the man who recites Shakespeare sonnets while tracing a crop over her tightly bound body. But after a failed marriage proposal, her lover orders her away from him and tells her she needs to experience more things and different men. When April meets a male slave called Daisy she discovers that her own sexuality extends beyond willing obedience. She switches between slave and mistress, between aching for her lover and excitement at playing with her new pet. Will she be able to maintain both roles or will she have to make a decision about who she truly is?

Release date: February 21, 2013

Publisher: Accent Press

Print pages: 196

Sample

Chapter One - Cat

There was a time; a moment. The texture of salted eel on my tongue. He’d taken me to a Chinese restaurant outside our normal price range and I’d ordered the most expensive thing on the menu. It was the first time I tasted eel, the slight hint of fish, but something else unique and distinct.

He sat opposite me, speaking about his ex-wife, pretending that he was glad she left him all those years ago, that his life was better now. He talked about knowing himself and independence. Or I think he did. I stared over his shoulder, out of the window at the adverts for a Bad Film Club pasted on a wall across the street.

He never showed me any photos of his ex but, for some reason, if I thought of her, I imagined her as an alabaster beauty with long, auburn hair, an image straight out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting. In my narrative of what happened, I considered that he’d allowed me to slip into his life because I was different enough to be a distraction rather than a painful reminder of what he’d lost. The grandfather from Trinidad I’d never met left his traces in my coffee skin, dark curls, full lips. I liked to think that my curves were an inheritance from strong African women, who sweated through long, hot days providing for their family. Then, when the sun disappeared, they teased and tantalized, and made the men work for them.

But ancestry never held any real interest for me. Some men, whose names I don’t even remember now, eroticised me into some exotic creature from unknown lands. In truth, the furthest I’d travelled was a fortnight pretending to be a serene tourist around the Scottish Lochs.

For my lover, the colour of my skin was irrelevant. He obsessed over my breasts and seemed in awe of an intellect that I was never certain I actually possessed.

After the eels I led him back to my flat.

No, that isn’t right.

I remember the low, arrogant yowl of his beloved Siamese cat outside the bedroom door, that unmistakable noise they make when they want to show off the latest creature they’ve caught. His cat never bothered killing anything and looked on in disgust as mouse after vole after bird was humanely trapped and released back into the wild.

He, who was so finicky and particular about so many things, tolerated whatever that cat did. He adored it almost as much as I loved him. Almost.

His bedroom was always dark, his curtains closed as if we needed to hide what we were doing from the rest of the world. He never put the light on. We fumbled about and discovered each other within the shadows.

The thing between us, the love, wasn’t something you took home to parade in front of the family.

Still I daydreamed about introducing him to the people I was supposed to love most in the world, playing out the scene again and again, but it always worked out the same. My brother not looking up from his medical textbooks, so never noticing anything amiss. My sisters fighting to out-flirt each other, then exchanging meaningful looks of the kind that everyone is meant to see. My mother chatting as if they’re old, familiar friends, and then drawing me to one side in the kitchen to express in kindly terms her maternal concern. All the time being careful to stress that she knows it’s my life and I have to learn from my own mistakes.

He would survey it all with one of his wry looks. Until he saw the small photo of my dead father, smiling out from his place on the mantelpiece between the cheap knick-knacks my family picked up on various trips to Spain. Once he saw that, my lover would turn to me, no longer pretending to smile. And that would be an end.

But in the darkness of his bedroom, there was no family, no one to judge us, no one to care about us. I could breathe into his ear, or scream out every atom of air from my lungs, ‘Fuck me, Daddy. Please fuck me.’

Mostly we plummeted into sex, freely tumbling down into the blackness, never knowing or thinking whether we would ever stop falling. Clinging to each other’s flesh, nails clawing into skin, not for comfort or succour, but to ensure there was no escape for either of us.

Sometimes though, he’d say a line like, “Does my little girl deserve my big fat cock?” And we’d both laugh, giggle, as if we were little children who repeated words like “bum” and “willy” to each other and revelled in their self-perceived levels of daring and naughtiness.

I think those were the moments I loved him most. Or rather, they were the moments when my love felt free and happy and light, instead of a heavy, painful weight trapped in my heart. The times when we could be amused at the absurdity, the cliché of us; the young woman in her demure blouse and too-short skirt seeking knowledge in the bed of her former university tutor; the mature man seeking virile reassurance and escape from an impending sense of mortality between the thighs of a nubile, youthful woman; the daddy’s girl, scared to be alone in the big wide world, only capable of finding fulfilment with a man almost twice her age.

Together, acknowledging our ridiculousness, I thought there were no boundaries between us. And maybe there weren’t. Apart from the obvious ones.

Looking at a photo of his two gorgeous, blonde daughters, and thinking, like everyone normal would have, that the eldest was only a year younger than me, I asked in what I mistook for intellectual curiosity and detachment, ‘In your experience, do parents ever feel a forbidden physical attraction to their children?’

He stopped what he was doing, spreading a thick layer of whisky marmalade on a slice of toast at the dining room table, and stared at me with an expression I’d never seen on his face before. An expression I’d only seen worn by others. A look of disbelief, disgust, but never shock that I would be so inappropriate.

I blushed. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know myself sometimes.’

‘You always know yourself; your problem is choosing to be ignorant of others.’ He looked down at his toast but didn’t continue with the marmalade. He sighed as if it was all too much effort.

The Siamese, like any good carnivore sensing doubt and weakness, took advantage. It leapt onto the table and started licking at the butter dish. My lover acted as if he was oblivious to the creature. Watching it turned my stomach, but I didn’t feel confident enough to step forward and brush it back onto the floor. My hand shook as I replaced the photo of the golden daughters back on the shelf.

‘I only want to please you.’ We both knew it was a half-lie, or rather, a half-truth. I wanted to please him, but that was far from being the only thing I desired. Still, my words seemed to appease him a little.

He looked up at me and his eyes weren’t as cold as they were before. ‘If my mother hadn’t brought me up to be a gentleman, and if I didn’t know how much you’d enjoy it, I’d hit you right now.’

My body responded to the hint of flirtation, a hint was all I needed. ‘Which part of me would you hit? Sir?’

He looked me up and down and made a small gesture with his hands for me to turn around. I obeyed, my heart beating fast. None of the timid little boyfriends I’d had before ever affected me in this way, made me feel so primal.

With my back to him, unable to gaze into his commanding eyes, the thrill somehow increased with the unknown. Sensing him behind me, but not seeing him, thinking how he could push me down and take me.

His chair scraped across the wooden floorboards and my body tensed.

‘Which part of your body would you like me to spank?’ His voice was deep, full of confidence. The question was part of the game, a tease. He could and would spank, bite, whip, twist whichever part of me he wanted to; my wishes were irrelevant.

I dissolved into his desire, melted into his hunger. I imagined that what I experienced under his control, the sense of complete intoxication and separation from my own consciousness, was what it was like to be high. Something I’d never experienced via the more traditional methods.

Some place near the beginning of our relationship, he had tempted me with a variety of white pills, fine powder, and sweet-smelling cigarettes.

‘It will increase the intensity of sex. You won’t believe how it can be until you experience it.’ He stroked my hair as he spoke.

‘No,’ I replied.

A simple “no” in the midst of our tangled relationship. An imitation of the well-trained Catholic schoolgirl I was in another lifetime, only allowing myself one vice at a time. My refusal didn’t originate from the indoctrination of my childhood, nor from vague memories of watching a Grange Hill – or was it EastEnders? – character OD in a grubby bathroom; what stopped me was a fear of a greater sexual intensity. As things were I could just about cope with everyday life; waking up for work, not getting behind on my credit cards, remembering to drop into the shop and buy a pint of milk. What would I be like if the thumping in my chest, the heat between my legs, the obsession of my mind, became more intense?

‘Which part of your body would you like me to spank, sweet girl?’ There was amusement rather than irritation in his tone that I hadn’t replied yet.

‘My breasts. I’d like you to spank my tits, sir.’

His arms were around me, his hands gripping my chest, the warm of his breath on my neck.

I cried out in pleasure and surprise.

He’d moved so silently that even listening as I was, I didn’t know how close he was to me until his fingers were pushing hard into the soft flesh of my breasts. I leant my body back into him more from instinct than thought. His hardness seemed to reach out for me, pressing through the fabric of our clothes; a sensation of being naked rushed through me. It was something I often felt in my lover’s presence, unclothed, vulnerable, and entirely sexual.

I started to pull at the buttons of my top. He took me by the wrist and led me upstairs to his bedroom.

The morning sun shone through the undrawn curtains, casting red light through the room. He released me and I yanked my clothes off as if they were poisonous. One of the stories my lover had taught me flashed through my mind.

Deianira accidentally killing her husband, Heracles, with the gift of a poisoned cloak, when all she wanted to do was incite his desire for her again. I couldn’t vocalise it, but I felt the significance of the tale deep inside my being. And it excited me.

I tumbled backwards onto the unmade bed. He grabbed my ankles, spread my legs wide, and stood between them. I arched my back in expectation, breathing deeply, filling my lungs with the sweet-sour scent that clung to the sheets and told of entwined limbs and bruised skin and aching hearts.

‘I want you so much.’ I whispered the words as if they were too important to be spoken aloud. As if they were special, essential, personal, secret; not just a faint echo of billions of voices pleading for love across the millennia.

He laughed. ‘So you always tell me.’

He let go of my ankles and walked out of the room. The door clicked softly behind him.

But that wasn’t the time or the moment that I wanted to relive, that I keep reliving.

Back into the darkness of his bedroom, with the taste of salted eel still resting on my tongue, a remnant, a memory of the meal now dissolving in my stomach.

The persistent growl-meow of the Siamese on the other side of the door. My hands and feet tied to the bedposts with loose knots that gave the illusion that if I pulled I’d be free. Of course, it didn’t work like that: if I pulled against them, the knots tightened and the rope ripped into my skin.

My lover standing naked above me, a foot on either side of my waist, his head bowed so as not to touch the ceiling, his right hand holding his favourite cat o’ nine tails. As I looked up, he was more shadow than man, providing him with an ethereal quality. In contrast, his weapon of choice was solid and more real than either of our bodies. The leather had already died and been transformed; we were still fragile and mortal, a mess of desires we had no want to control.

He teased the cat over my face. I breathed in the familiar scent of the old leather, biting down on the tendrils as they danced around my mouth. He pulled it away from me and flicked it over my breasts. The air fled from me as if I’d been punched in the stomach, but the sound I made was one of pleasure.

He slashed the leather across my nipples, first one, then the other, and then back to the first one. Over and over again. I didn’t cry out or beg for mercy. That night was one of the divine times. Those rare moments when it was not about the pleasure in the pain, it was all about the pleasure.

There was something almost Buddhist in it, the manner in which the body could endure so much. But that is not a correct comparison. In my little understanding, Buddhism is about the removal of the mind from the suffering of the flesh, and that night my body and mind and soul were united. And there was nothing serene and quiet about me. I was proud and excited. Desirous and yearning to know what my limits were, how far he would push me.

He gently stroked the cat over my stomach, before adjusting his position so he now stood at the side of the bed with his weapon raised flirtatiously above my cunt. He thwacked it down with what I guessed wouldn’t even be a quarter of his strength, but all the strips of leather reached out and stung me in the most tender and sensitive part of my being. I smiled and sighed and I may even have laughed, such was the power of the short, sweet leather kisses.

‘Your pussy likes the cat?’ His voice was a purr, part of his pun.

In the darkness I imagined the flash of his white teeth, the way he raised one eyebrow whenever we got into one of our private innuendo conversations which had all the subtlety of Carry On films or Shakespeare at his most bawdy. Occasionally we carried out these exchanges at dinner parties or in the midst of the pomp and forced intellectualism of university gatherings. The only rule was that the lines had to be delivered with complete seductive seriousness.

‘My pussy loves the cat,’ I purred back at him. ‘But perhaps there is another weapon on your person she’d love even more.’

‘That would be unfair, to leave so much of your body untouched, unclawed by the cat.’

‘It would. It w …’ Whatever I was going to say was immediately forgotten as he slashed the cat o’ nine tails over my thighs, attacking them both in one strong swipe.

There were no more words for a long time.

I liked to imagine that he chose the cat o’ nine tails as he knew it was my favourite implement too. I wasn’t certain if I only enjoyed it so much because I wanted to please and immolate his desires. I like to think there was more to it than that.

In the near darkness, watching shadows as my lover brandished the weapon, an echo of the ancient castigatory tool, I sensed the ghosts of all the tough naval men whose bodies had quivered in front of such punishment. I imagined people from Trinidad and Tobago, people who shared my blood and carried my genes through the ages, stubborn but terrified when faced with this instrument of state justice. This whip was a killer. And here was I, this insignificant girl, willingly tied to a bed, my whole body yearning the touch of the cat’s claws. There was comfort in how small I was, how twisted my desires seemed, and, most of all, I was in awe and amazed at my own complete trust in my lover.

My trust was like an entity on its own, something delicate and beautiful like a butterfly’s wings, something which you’re always warned not to touch, just to admire the pretty colours.

My lover moved up and down my body, whipping every part of me, pausing a moment for my flesh to be soothed by the air, before he began the assault again, working down from the tenderness of my nipples to the most sensitive parts of my feet. The night disappeared into the sting of the leather.

But he can’t have spent the night whipping me. The cat o’ nine tails is a vicious implement; I would have been flayed. And although I was often marked after one of our nights together, the red lines always faded. I was never scarred, even though I wanted to be. Even though we both knew I wanted to be.

In truth, on that night he would not have spent more than an hour teasing and tantalizing me with his cat o’ nine tails, and the time that the leather was actually on my skin in a violent manner probably would have been less than a minute. But time is never consistent. A moment can be a drop of eternity with a skilled lover.

In the shadows, as I watched him work on my body I loved his experience, I loved his wife, I loved his girlfriends, I loved his one boyfriend, all the people who had moulded him and helped him, who had taught him how to hold a whip in the correct manner, how to hurt without hurting, how tantalizing the mind was essential to the physical pleasure. I loved them most of all for not hoarding him to themselves, for being foolish enough to let him go. I loved that he was here in this moment and he was mine. As much as any person had ever been mine.

After he completed whipping me we didn’t have normal sex. Sometimes it was too crude after the spiritual high of the giving and receiving of pain to revert to our animalistic selves and dissolve into being no more than vessels for our cock and cunt. Although there were so many other times when all we wanted to be were beasts lost to all conscious thought.

When he finished, when he knew I’d reached my limit, he put the cat away and left me tied up and alone in the room. He always left the door open as if I was a young child requiring the comfort of knowing there were other people moving about in the house, that I wasn’t left on my own with the darkness and the ghosts.

He went away and did his thing, I never knew what. I didn’t strain to hear his every movement; maybe I was supposed to? I lay still and listened to my own breathing, mentally retracing every place that I had been whipped, patiently content to await his return.

After he had done whatever he did on those nights …

Slowly savoured a glass of 1961 Chateau Latour.

Pigged out on cheap, sugary cereal straight out of the box.

Read his favourite verses from T.S. Eliot, “April is the cruellest month” etc etc.

Rushed to buy the last diamonique cat brooch on QVC.

Danced a happy jig around his lounge because he had a hot young woman tied to his bed.

Had a quick nap

Wanked over secret photos of his ex-wife

I don’t know. In this case, your guess might be as good as mine.

Afterwards, he came back to me. He untied his knots, staring at me not the ropes, gently massaging my feet and hands. Every other time except this night, he got into bed beside me and I wrapped my body around him, resting my head on his shoulder and together we’d cry, not out of sadness or happiness, just because it felt right and necessary.

This night he got into be. . .